A NEW book release, following the first project dedicated to the Isle of Wight’s LGBTQ+ history from the last 100 years, is set to hit bookshelves in early 2022.

At approximately 300 pages long, Out On An Island explores a rich history that has been largely hidden, erased, or ignored.

The book was funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, and edited by Franko Figueiredo and Caroline Diamond, founders of StoneCrab’s Out On An Island group.

Author, Patrick Gale, whose father Michael was a governor at the prison on the Island, said: “I’ve never forgotten ringing Gay Switchboard as a disco bunny twenty-something to ask where we could go in Ventnor or Shanklin for a wild Saturday night and being told by the solemn woman at the other end, 'Get off the Island'.

“It’s therefore hugely heartening to find this vivid proof that there were indeed alternative and queer lives being lived in the Land That Time Forgot, and to realise that the painstaking production of this book is evidence that there still are.”

The book features real-life stories from 17 LGBTQ+ people who shared honest and intimate accounts, as well as stories, poems and images contributed by many local LGBTQ+ people and allies.

 

The book features the Islands own HIV campaign, with its Captain Condom mascot and the work of Karl Love. Picture courtesy of Out On An Island.

The book features the Island's own HIV campaign, with its Captain Condom mascot and the work of Karl Love. Picture courtesy of Out On An Island.

 

It also looks back at historical figures such as Joe Carstairs, Virginia Woolf, Algernon Swinburne, and more recently Kenneth Kendall and connected Island locations, from Dimbola Lodge in Freshwater to East Dene in Bonchurch.

StoneCrabs artistic director, Franko, explained: “There is much to celebrate, and so much you will uncover: a thriving LGBTQ+ community of the 1990s, recollections of the Isle of Wight’s first Pride events from 2017 and the stories of people who made their home here, such as much-loved BBC newsreader, Kenneth Kendall.”

Project manager, Caroline Diamond, said: “Russell T. Davies chose the Isle of Wight as an old fashioned, isolated destination for his hit Channel 4 programme It’s A Sin, which looked at the impact of AIDS on the LGBTQ+ community in the late 1980s.

“This book features the Isle of Wight’s own HIV campaign, with its Captain Condom mascot and the work of Karl Love, who was an NHS sexual health worker at that time.”

The publication date is February 14, and the launch will be at Carisbrooke Castle Museum, where the project exhibition will be hosted until August 2022.

The book is a special limited edition and is available to pre-order now at www.medinabookshop.com/product/out-on-an-island-edited-by-franko-figueiredo-stow-and-caroline-diamond.